Obama's Cuba Gambit Follows No Significant Change from Communist Regime

Today the Obama administration announced that it is beginning the process of normalizing relations with the Castro-lead government in communist Cuba. While we believe the United States should seek to engage in peaceful relationships and free commerce with as many countries around the world as possible, especially those within such close proximity, we are concerned by the lack of significant change in the Cuban government and governing structure that precedes this announcement.

To be clear, the people in charge of Cuba to this day, specifically Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl, are the same men that rose to power through mass murder. They are the same men that have brutally repressed the freedoms of the Cuban people, forcing many thousands to attempt a dangerous trek in makeshift rafts across shark-infested waters to freedom in the US. Finally, they are the same men who urged the Soviet Union to use their nation as a launching pad for a preemptive nuclear attack on millions of innocent American men, women, and children.

While relations have improved with many of our former Cold War adversaries, the fact is that regimes have changed in those nations. Despite all of our current issues with the Russian government, it is indeed a Russian government, not a Soviet one. Cuba has not changed. It is still an isolated vestige of communism, an economic and political system responsible for nearly 100 million deaths during the 20^th Century in places like China, the Soviet Union, Cambodia, Vietnam, and North Korea.

If the United States is to end its political and economic isolation of Cuba, then it ought to come at the price of the Cubans finally ending their failed experiment with a reprehensible communist system in addition to the Castro brothers and their thugs being removed from power.

We urge Congress, when inevitably presented with the request to end the American embargo of Cuba, to not forget the hundreds of thousands of Cuban-Americans who themselves fled the Castro regime in Cuba or are directly descended from those brave refugees. Further, we urge Congress to remember the 13 days of October 1962, when, to quote then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, “we literally looked down the gun barrel into nuclear war,” because of the actions of the still-extant Castro regime.